one of the consequences of large growing deficits and debt that we violated in an issue brief last summer is as it melts relative to the size of the economy it reduces flexibility for policymakers to respond to domestic and international developments. this sort of economic development would be weakness in the economy. it is more difficult for the government to respond to that

when debt is high. at this point in time the challenge we face is the withdrawal is slowing the growth of the economy. with that as large as it is running larger deficits and accumulating more debt has important risks and if left unchanged over coming years to the second half of the decade and beyond would weigh on output and income is. >> have you ever had to a projection with this much uncertainty for every single variable? >> i arrived in january of 2009. seems like it has been a pretty uncertain situation ever since then.

economic forecasting is a hard business. i spend some time doing that at the federal reserve board. we have terrific people here doing it but it is always uncertain. we report every year on the accuracy of our economic forecast. it is an important piece of transparency. we are no worse at it than anybody else but it is a hard business to get right in any time. without doubt it is harder when one is experiencing difficult economic circumstances. there has been no period of time in cbo history when we have had as severe a recession as we have now. one can look to other countries that have experienced financial crises and see what happened in their economy in the wake of those crises and the work of common reinhardt and vincent reinhardt showed economies tend

to perform quite badly for some time after financial crises. but that work doesn't say exactly what the causal mechanisms are. it is difficult to know how to apply those to our specific circumstances. we don't have much experience with this in the united states in recent times. it is a particularly uncertain -- >> this report in particular may be less trustworthy than other reports? >> i wouldn't put it that way. we have had somewhat similar sections of uncertainty in our economic forecast in each of the reports i can remember. it is not more uncertain than the one in january or last august or january of 2010.

but this whole period has been uncertain. what we are trying to do is provide for the congress the best assessment we can and for practical purposes that means writing down very precise numbers after the decimal place. we are trying to be very transparent about the uncertainties that are here and to encourage everybody who reads this document or many things we right to recognize that around specific estimates it will be a fairly large band of uncertainty. >> 1-1/2 questions. they're going to hold steady for another two years. was that in the forecast? this discussion of long-term unemployment. does that hurt job skills or avoid future and so on? where do you stand on that?

>> we did not take on the federal reserve reason denouncement. that is one of the reason market interest rates are lower than projected. we continue to think hard about the role of cyclical forces and structural forces in the high level of unemployment and we have in this report offered some quantification of those factors. if you want to check later at pieces 46 and 47 of the report. what we say, emphasizing uncertainty, our assessment of total increase in unemployment, about one percentage point stems from structural factors. the remaining four percentage

points rising from cyclical factors. we talk about specific structural factors we have in mind. one is the effect of the enhanced unemployment insurance benefits. another is the difficulty of the mismatches between skills and location of available workers and requirements of particular jobs. we talk about difficulties of long-term unemployed have in finding work. we had an issue last year about the effects of job loss during recession and it is a discouraging story. people who lose jobs especially in a recession have difficulty finding work. they find work and often earn less money than in their previous job and not just in the short-term but for many years to come.

in this projection we think there's a fair amount of unemployment due to structural forces now but more through cyclical forces. over the next ten years we expect cyclical unemployment will come down and much of the structural unemployment will fade. the extra benefits are in the course of expiring. these mismatches between skills and locations of job-seekers and requirements of jobs tend to work overtime as it has been passed expansion by retraining and stalin. we think by the end of the decade there will be lingering effects of people who lost jobs and been unemployed for a long time having difficulty finding work. even by the end of the decade the unemployment rate in this projection is a little higher, not the 5% we have traditionally thought about at the longer term

level of unemployment. >> i believe cbo about this time every year updates its projections on the highway trust fund which has been ailing for some time. is it getting worse or better? >> the particular issue with the highway trust fund is the authority to collect the gasoline tax and spend money out of the trust fund is higher at the end of next month. we don't have more specific projections of balance in the trust fund available or not. -- i do not have available in front of me. we will check for you. >> today's forecast of the rate of loss and municipal bonds and tax-exempt bonds across the federal government including the

investment? >> our baseline projection incorporates the effects like that. i don't think it is one we have isolated in a separate quantitative way. another question i can answer? >> would you say this is a better outcome or a worse outlook were the same outlook? >> let me talk about the economy. i have sat here twice a year for a few years and had discouraging economic news every time i've come including today. we have a picture of the gap between potential output achieved with high rate of labor

and capital. the cumulative gap between potential and actual output since the recession began now stands at $2 trillion. telos output because we have not kept our capital resources more fully employed and the projection of that under current law is for a cumulative debt between now and 2017 of another $2 trillion. so the losses in economic output from this downturn -- those losses are not shared evenly. they are borne disproportionately by people who lose their jobs or had business fail or thrown out of their homes and you see a similar pattern and unemployment rate forecasts were tremendous extra over the past two years but a tremendous amount still comes. great deal of the pain of this

economic downturn lies ahead of us. whether that forecast is better or worse than it was in january or better or worse than it was a month and a half ago is a lesser point than recognizing how urgent the economic outlook is now and has been on many previous occasions when we sat here together. on the budget side the budget control act makes a real difference in the budget outlook. we have large projected deficits over the next decade by $2.1 trillion because of the budget control act. that is a substantial amount of money even by the standards of current federal budget. i guess that is good news. the challenges that remain are

very large. part of that is a very big chunk of the savings from the budget control act have not been worked out yet. they are rising from instructions to deficit reduction committee and the fall back plan but there's not a set of policies members of congress have agreed to in specific terms. that is the challenge ahead for the congress to di side what policies to achieve those. cutbacks in discretionary spending are more specific. we have specific levels set in law but the actual appropriations to meet those levels have not been decided upon. near the end of the budget chapter of the report we had possible paths for defense spending and nondefense spending

consistent with overall caps and be on the first few years they are set in overall terms for discretionary funding. we don't know -- nobody knows how that might play out but we want to offer an alternative to illustrate what the possibilities are. but the allocation of those savings, what parts of what the federal government won't do in the future as real discretionary spending comes down remains a challenge. beyond that there is the expiration of very large pieces some at the end of this year and some next year. many members of congress have been public in their view that we should maintain current tax

rules rather than following current law. as we show in the report extending all the expiring tax provisions would widen budget deficits relative to our baseline projection by trillions of dollars. there are a tremendous number of issues that are unsettled and look important in this document and beyond that we still have that higher relative to gdp than has been at any point in my lifetime. that creates dangers for the economy and we have a trajectory beyond the coming decade were further increases in health care cost per person will make the budget even harder to bring into alignment and put on a sustainable path. i don't want to diminish what

has happened. at the same time there is no doubt there are profound budget challenges and economic challenges that remain. >> we often hear in news conferences that the reduction in debt and the deficit is not nearly enough to make an impact in the long term. one of the members -- i should say one of the -- the supercommittee should be looking at $4 trillion in reduction and the 2.1 when all is said and done is nothing. i know you don't want to get into a debate with politicians but just in terms of real reduction, is this package large

enough that is coming? >> i would not call $2.1 trillion nothing. as i explained even taking that on board, if we continue current policies on the tax and spending side of the budget we will end up with much larger deficits than would occur under current law because it involves exploration or changes in policy. there is a good deal of work left to do. it is not our place to say how much any particular committee or congress or process should do differently. >> a great deal of pain because of projections in the next couple years. >> look at this picture of the

unemployment rate on the bottom of the cover. look at where the dividing line is between actual history and what we project. there are other pictures one could use. that makes the point. >> some things that were pulling down the economy in the short term, household wealth and leveraging and stuff. in the short-term is that driving slower economic growth and higher unemployment? is there any room for policy in the short term to have an affect on that? is it something we have to work out and whether the storm? >> we think fixable -- fiscal

policy could reduce unemployment. we had lengthy analysis in january of 2010. we look at a range of options on the tax and spending side and tried to to estimate the effect of those options on output and unemployment. we have not read done that analysis. it would be different today because it shifted in some ways but the basic lessons still stand. we think there are a number of ways the congress could reduce taxes or raise spending relative to current law that would raise output in the next few years. the challenge becomes what to do beyond that. the extra debt incurred from expansionary policy would weigh on the economy unless future policy changes are made and it is possible to make those changes. we need to make those changes because under current policy the

deficit is on an unsustainable path. one can combine short-term stimulus and long-term restraint in a way that would boost the economy in the near term and not prove to be a dragon long-term but requires a complicated combination of policy. they look like a paradox that first glance but not really. it is consistent with the consensus of economic thinking. that is the first thing our analysis shows. >> on the positive side -- >> how much of it one does. what we looked at in that report was general policies in the sense meaning not focused on the housing sector in particular. many ideas proposed and tried to

resolve problems in the housing and mortgage area. we have not done a comprehensive analysis ourselves. the general point to remember is we have an economy that although smaller is still very big output, right now $15 trillion at an annual rate. it is going to be hard to move that very much without applying large changes in spending or taxes. the specific effects of specific policies we have to look at. >> with medicare -- any changes in your projections on medicare costs in the next decade? >> we change the medicare projections a little bit. if you look at appendix a which talks about revisions to

medicare over coming decades. they are not particularly large. a project medicare spending but not particularly local. people have questions we can talk more about that. the thing i would emphasize is the number of people over 65 will be about 1-third larger ten years from now than it is today. the most important factor driving medicare spending is greatly increased number of beneficiaries. given the current law for medicare pertaining to doctors and reductions in payments to providers and health care legislation, medicare spending is not growing especially fast over the coming decades under

current law. whether that current law remained unchanged is a different question but in baseline projections for current what medicare spending is not going very fast. what you are seeing mostly is a surge from the retirement to the baby boom. this is not news. this is what cbo is writing about for its entire existence. but it is now upon us in force. >> i am hoping you can describe it. the difference in size between the expiration of the tax cuts that might happen and deficit reductions that were agreed upon? it expires or doesn't expire to be agreed upon? >> two numbers i will highlight. we estimate the budget control

act reduces deficits over the coming ten years by $2.1 trillion. another number in the report is most of the expiring tax provisions were extended, if the alternative minimum tax was indexed for inflation and if medicare payments to doctors were frozen rather than falling sharply under current law deficits over the next decade would be $5 trillion larger than our baseline projections. if all those changes to perfect and policies were extended indefinitely rather than expiring they would widen the deficit by 2.5 times the amount of deficit reduction to the budget control act. >> the 2010 tax act and those

tax cuts? [talking over each other] >> the retiring tax provision. the ten year numbers -- we explained what that means so you can read the details that are important. it means extending as of 2001-2003 tax provisions. this was discussed in a number of places in the report. in the summary and chapter 1 and then there is a table which looks at a number of alternative policies and our estimate of budgetary effects. we do this in every of look and updates and one can look at the pieces of that and see which ones are large or small. another question? >> very quickly.

is the gap between output and what could happen largely because of big corporations sitting on piles of cash? >> it is because of all the factors that are causing us -- a sharp fall in gdp and lead to a weak recovery. if you look at this first chart in chapter 2 of the report, we estimate -- is not something we know as a fact but it has continued to rise. it fell below that and has risen roughly in line with potential. why the gap exists is why the recovery is so weak. that is a hard question that we give a lot of thought to. empirical evidence suggests weak recovery has fallen in financial

crises that are not surprising but that is not the same as knowing the cause of mechanisms. part of it is probably loss of household wealth and a desire to save more. part of that is concerned about the amount of debt they have and trying to reduce their debt. part is businesses being concerned how much debt they have. an important part is households and businesses not being confident about future income or sales and being cautious which is a sensible strategy but for the economy as a whole if i am cautious about the review. review are more cautious buying things from me. that can weigh on the economy as a whole. we have continued credit constraints, relative situation before the financial crisis all

large firms can borrow at low interest rates and mortgage rates for households to qualify for fannie and freddie and guaranteed mortgages. some households don't qualify that would have before. smaller businesses having trouble getting credit. we have a very weak housing market. if the level of home construction and other pieces of residential construction in the communication council were at the level we would be at in a sustainable way that kept pace with the growth of the population the gap between where it is and where it would be on the sustainable basis is 2% of gdp. it may not be equal but it is meant to show just how much weakness in housing it can matter for the economy. an awful lot of factors may be

at work. our important that our relative to each other and how quickly they will wayne --wane is an important question. we wish we understood that. >> where do you get your numbers for true deductions? >> if you are looking at -- [inaudible] >> table 1.7 port 1.8. table 1.a look at selected policies for alternatives. apart from the caps on discretionary spending cbo is instructed by law to construct its discretionary spending, take the life -- latest level of funding provided by congress and as soon as that continues with

adjustments for inflation. will mackenzie discretionary baseline. the caps don't climb to war funding for iraq and afghanistan or related activities. for that sort of funding we have followed the traditional growth of falling into inflation. some people have noted we don't expect to fight at the same level of intensity. one of the alternatives we have tried to illustrate is how much different it would be if the level of funding for the overseas contingency operation goes down. we picked a hypothetical path that is not meant to correspond to any particular strategic approach to u.s. national security. it is trying to illustrate how much difference it makes if the level of funding comes down. it is the same scenario as the

previous report. it is just meant to illustrate how large the numbers are. we have been doing a good deal of war funding so if one tapirs it off one can save money regardless of projections. this particular scenario reduces discretionary spending by $1.1 trillion with $200 billion of savings on top of that. we also note in the report there are ways the level of spending we project with inflation would be lower than the veterans' benefits or pal grants. these discretionary projections are extrapolations of current funding not meant to reflect the

assessment of the need for funding or the cost of maintaining current policy. it is the only part of this report. discretionary spending is growing. ..

>> the baseline projections for everything else follow the levels in the caps. and even for defense spending its config. we've done an analysis a few months ago of the costs of implementing the policies, the actual national security policy laid out by the defense department in the future years defense program, earlier this year. and that would be more expensive than our baseline projection for non-war funding from defense department. they have a set of specific plans for the things they want to build and do, and we have a full report, our independent estimate cost of that. and that program would cost a good deal more by our estimates, would be the inflated baseline. so again, an example of how the regular baseline projections that we do for discretionary

spending don't necessarily correspond to any particular set of programs or plans in the future on the defense our nondefense site. is that enough? thank you very much. if you have other questions later, you know where to reach us. please give us a call. thank you. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> this weeks events leading to the dedication of the martin luther king, jr. memorial includes a civil rights pioneer function today at noon eastern. participants include attorney general eric holder, reverend jesse jackson and reverend walter fought the road. live coverage is on c-span at noon eastern. also live on c-span, at noon on friday is a luncheon honoring women in civil rights with attribute to coretta scott king, speakers include my angel, bernice king, and b.e.t. president debra lee. >> the dedication ceremony for the memorial to dr. king is at 11 a.m. on sunday, the 40th anniversary of his "i have a dream" speech. thousands are expected to attend the event and hear from president obama, representative john lewis, ambassador andrew young, members of the king

family and others. >> several live events to tell you about today. the pentagon has scheduled a news conference of afghanistan operations. >> now a fordham institute debate on reforms affecting teachers and the effect of budget cuts on their pensions, health care and other benefits. we were shown as much of this as we can until our live event at

11 eastern. >> good morning. good morning. good morning, class. good morning. my name is mike petrilli, welcome. for those of you are not familiar with fordham where one of the nation's leading education policy think tanks. we do work here in washington but we also do work on the ground in ohio, specific and her hometown of dayton. we don't just talk about education reform. we also do it on the ground in a real place with real kids. we are proud about that. i'm very excited to be monitoring today's session. a session that was the idea came from rick and randi. my understand is that rick and randi ran into each other from time to time, and all this

debate is vigorous discussion on some of the big reforms have been pushed through this year, often it's more heat than light. so what do we do if we get together and have a conversation, conversation that doesn't paper over our differences around some of these key issues. admit that there are some series disagreements about which way to go. but not in way that is as personal as the public debates have often been. so that's the goal for today. again, not to pretend that they're on the disagreements about key issues, but identify what those are and to see if possible there is common ground. i don't think i need to do much introduction but i will say randi weingarten, rick hess. now, my job as moderator is to be fair. i don't think i can claim to be impartial. rick is one of my best friends. we collaborate on a lot of things including the education gaps via podcast.

which if you're not listening to every week you're missing out. certainly on rick's latest musings about the world. and pop-culture. we didn't know we're going to be having c-span take this. we are decided -- excited rick decided to wear pants for the occasion. otherwise he would've been looking at rick's knees the entire time. we weren't sure america was ready for that. so what we're going to talk about today are these big reforms related to teachers that have been vigorously debated in the last couple of years, but especially the spring and states around the country. the education reform conversation has talked about lots of different issues, accountability, choice and charters. but now it seems like the conversation is getting to the heart of the enterprise. what happens inside the classroom. and directly around teachers

professional lives. we're talking about things like evaluating teachers in any way, talking about laying off teachers based on the effectiveness instead of just -- talk about paying teachers differently and tying that to performance. talking about curtailing collective bargaining rights. these are things that get very personal very quickly. we want to talk about all of these issues and again have a very polite but vigorous discussion and disagreement. now, i come to this discussion, and again we were recruited into playing this role and happy to do so, i should admit there's some skepticism. i want to read a quote from steven brill punches the other day just to set the context, okay? i'm sorry, ready. is that you use that for 24 hours of interviews with steven brill he said? pretty remarkable. >> twenty-four -- actually that isn't true. but it did feel to me like --

[laughter] >> root canal, steven brill. >> he said in the kumbaya feeling you get watching union leaders sitting on panels with reformers, they call me discussed the joint mission to do what's best for children, when you go to the financial records or the campaign finance fight as yet they continue to sponsor the politician to take the most hardline anti-reform position and punish those who stray before even the milder form that declined. so that's some context here. again, we want to make sure that we're being honest when there are significant disagreements. so let's get started. we are going to start with kind of a broad topic about teachers and reform, and particularly this idea about teachers feeling under attack right now in this moment of history. let me start with you, randi. issue since the teachers to feel under attack? i don't know that. is this just anecdotal or do have some good polling data?

and what is it that is making them feel under attack right now? >> so, first off, thank you. i'm glad we're doing this. there are people that actually do work in the summer in washington, d.c.. this is proof of that. you know, even mike, and mike thank you for moderating, so even, not the question that even the introduction, think about what he said. as you were quoting back that quote, which is pretty demagoguery, i was thinking i wonder whether my walking around colorado a few days before michael bennet's reelection for senate qualifies as one of those things. so what ends up happening in this debate, and you said it, is that it gets so polarized that as opposed to engaging in a real way you end up first having to

defend yourself, which looks, which seems silly in a world where actually we are trying to figure out how to educate kids. so, you know, this is why teachers feel under attack. new poll just came out last week. last week, two weeks ago, whenever it came out. losing track of time but as i get older i lose track of time. one of the most interesting results of that poll said that even the teachers are respected more than ever before, more than administrators, more than principles, more than policymakers, even more than parents. and i see even more than parents because parents have a really important role in all of the we do. they said that two-thirds of the

reporting that they see on education is makes. so when you have that steady drumbeat of negativity, when you have people who are called names or even kind of gross characterizations that brill repeatedly makes in the book, you feel bad about it. and people give badly even when, you know, mike, when you're talking about the kind of, this kind of session, about how we are focused on teachers. you use the word evaluating teachers, leading teachers off, paying teachers. my teacher voice, and i tot full and part-time, clara barton high school in brooklyn, my teacher voice started saying well, what about the tools and conditions i need to do my job. and that's never actually in the debate, even though what teachers have said to us, their unions is that basically help us

get the tools and conditions we need to do our job. so you can look at lots of different things but over and over and over again that's why teachers who badly. and economic situation i think made it worse spent what you think, rick? our teachers under attack? >> i think this is one by randi and i come at from very different perspective. i think first off let me say that i think randi made to perfectly reasonable points. one is as we talk about holding anybody accountable for the work they do, it makes sense to talk about making sure we're putting that in a position to succeed, that there's that balance. i think that is absolutely there. second, randi alluded to the point about two-thirds of coverage feeling negative. i'm not sure exactly what judnick of that. i mean, i don't know what the research on this but as a think about coverage of health care, about transportation, about airlines, about banking, it

strikes me at two-thirds and probably not an unusual mix for kind of negative or positive coverage of anything in the public domain. so a couple more specific points. one, if randi mentioned in the poll we know that in 198450% of americans polled gave teachers and a or b. today, 69%. in the early 1990s, about 52, 53% of americans said they would like their child to become a teacher. today it is about two-thirds. so one interesting backdrop is for all the talk to the era of choice and accountability, teach for america, somehow or other esteem for the teacher profession seems to have raised pre-dramatically. a more fundamental point i want to make is there is this kind of narrative after that you've got these mean-spirited, you know, particularly republican governors who are on the warpath against teachers. and i just think that is, i think that is just and enormously problematic reading

of what these folks have said. what scott walker said this winter when he said we're broke, it's about time somebody stood up and told the truth. he said i have great respect for the more than 300,000 state and local government employees. they are good, hard-working people, professionals, blah, blah, blah. but when she said it's about money. the state of wisconsin is brokered we don't have anything to give anyone more. governor chris christie said last fall we have to get realistic and telling people the truth. nobody one of the teachers laid off, not me, not the school board, not the teachers union. so i would argue this does not sound to me like demagoguery. i think steven brill is another question. but these elected leaders i think i've actually been quite measured in response, if you think back to wisconsin six months ago, wisconsin was compared to pre-nazi germany, walker was compared to hitler and mubarak.

the speaker of the wisconsin state house, fitzgerald was threatened with an e-mail. we a plan -- we plan to assault you by right at your house and put a nice little bullet in your head. senator who had nails scattered on his driver and his when she'll broken received an e-mail, we will hunt you down, switch or so, drink your blood. i will have your decapitated head in the town square. this is your last warning. there were thousands of these reports are the wisconsin state government and collected and investigated. so, you know, the notion that somehow it was those pushing to rollback collective bargaining were somehow using vitriol on the warpath, and that their opponents were somehow being measured and responsible is to me at least i think in this reading of the dialogue. >> so, week, i agree with you, rick, that anytime that i am very concerned about the demagoguery.

and, in fact, years ago i got into trouble when i said that educators have to be really, educators have the right of freedom of speech. but we also have a responsibility in terms of how we use it. and you know, and i got into trouble for saying that by lots of people who said, you know, you should just protect the freedom of speech. our wisconsin federation also got these kinds of death threats. when i have seen people put up signs like comparing public figure to hitler, i denounced that. i think that's wrong. i think that we have to be really careful about what the origins of fascism are and we have to be really careful in terms of protecting our democracy. but where i divert from you is that the facts are very

different in what you said in terms of wisconsin. and the facts from chris christie are very different. i watched the youtube video of what a teacher said something to christie that he went right at the teacher and bullied a teacher. and that was a public official doing that in a very demagoguery way. i also watched the wisconsin unions basically tell walker, we will negotiate these issues. and he refused. he never met with him once. the issue is not budget. the issue was was whether they have a right to collectively bargain. and what we saw right after walker was elected was that the contract that the last governor and the state employees had done, which included millions

and millions of dollars of concession, walker found away to reject using the state senate. this was not about budget. this was actually about getting rid of rights. and that's, and i think that p. she didn't say was that, and a piece, that everyone started looking at and kind of shaking their head about was that when walker pushed through the budget repair bill initially, he also said he was going to call the state police out because he expected there to be violence. and if you remember, the call with koch brothers, he went on and on and on through the kind of things they're trying to do, including infiltrate the crowd to try to create that kind of violence. so, the issue here in terms of walker or rick scott is that,

saying that there shouldn't be a real dispassionate look at what we can do, but the unions in wisconsin agreed to the demands, and they were not even given the respect to have a meeting with walker. he wanted to eliminate collective bargaining spend let's talk more about that right now. let's go ahead and talk more about wisconsin. rick, as an educator, how can you support what governor walker did in wisconsin? look him he was cleared trying to score political points. he was going after teachers and not some of the other public sector workers. why we can the public sector, not the private sector unions? what's wrong with this idea that teachers should have a right to collective bargaining? >> i think there's a couple things going on. one, you know, again to kind of randy's point about, it's important this stuff is presented and addressed.

i thought it was unfortunate walker carved out i believe it was safety and fireworks, police and fire -- >> the ones who endorsed him. >> which is -- which is problematic. [laughter] >> which is one of those litigations that are now happening. spent on the other hand, if we think about say, president obama's strategy on health care reform, that there was an interesting array of carveout for organizations that have been smart enough to get behind obama in the 2008 campaign. so part of the way dealmaking occurs, like it or not, any democratic society, is sometimes these issues are addressed in a manner that is less principled than we might like. but the reality is that there's two issues on the table when we talk about the wisconsin collective bargaining. one is as randi points to there was a short-term fiscal crunch. and here not only is she right

that unions indicated they were open about going, to my my, finally going to the table to talk about redressing some of the issues with both health care factions. but the more fundamental question is those givebacks were going to make a big dent in the short-term fiscal picture. they just work. however, there's a second have to be more fundamental question which is that wisconsin, like the federal government, like just about every state government, has been living beyond its means for decades. the are a committed shortfall investments. and the problem is that we have had governor after governor in state after state who is content to kick the can down the road. and so the real rationale for trying to both rollback collective bargaining and to go after future contributions to pension and health care was not because that was actual going to help the 2012, 2013 deficits. here i think walker was, you

know, it was because the trajectory as you look five, 10 years out in terms of the fiscal condition of the state's. why do you need to curtail collective bargaining rights in order to change the trajectory? >> because school board superintendents in wisconsin and elsewhere have made it clear that they lack the intestinal fortitude to negotiate responsibly or to do a good job of curtailing and get -- one example. the wisconsin teacher pension system stipulates that employers will make it 620% contribution to the pension system on behalf of employed. employers were to make 6.2%. the walkie public schools in 1996 negotiated away so they are are paying the entirety of the employees she picks up 13% payment on top of each employee. in addition to that there was a supplemental 4.2% contribution made entirely. so impious was paying 17.2% of each teacher position into

pensions and something to pension. employers are making zero contribution. it's probably not a shock that while the median compensation for a tranninety to this last year was $56,000, fully loaded with benefits. $0,100,000 apiece. school boards and superintendents who are engaging in this over a bit of a decade have suggested that they are frankly probably not to be trusted in these kinds of negotiations. >> so basically governor walker took away local control over these issues? >> there's a couple of things. when we talk about public collective bargaining, public collective bargaining at the federal level was illegal until 1962 when president kennedy issued executive order. it was illegal for state and local employees until the night '50s, depending on the state. wisconsin i believe it was 59. there's a famous letter from frank and roosevelt to the president of the national federation of federal employees were he pointed out that all government employees should realize the process of collective bargaining is usually

understood, cannot be transplanted into the public sector. it has distinctive instrumental limitation when applied to public personnel management. this is fdr. the reason it has unique an insurmountable problem of public sector is the private sector, if you give away your too generous, if there to unaffordable, if you're general motors, competition could come in and knock your block off. in the public sector unfortunately, you don't have to have these mechanisms. >> and then there's also a quote by ronald reagan who said, and i don't have it with me, who talked about how important collective bargaining was, including in the public sector. and, you know, he gets, you know, what i'm saying is that if fdr was alive today, as are his successors, and you know, he would have a very different view of it for the following reasons. i'm not going, i think you have

a different view for the following reason. there's a fundamental difference of understanding in terms of the workplace, and what you can do using collective bargaining. and so, i want to actually go back to the wisconsin situation for a second. i was, you know, there's been a lot of negativity about unions in the last, you know, 20 years. and in bad economic times, what we've seen a lot of people do is say, they have benefits that are here, we have benefits that are lower than this, why shouldn't they be -- which is a very different ideal than america, has been america normally is

about help, not fear. but you can see in the economic anguish that we have right now the kind of negativity, the same thing read, what you said about in health, transportation, we look for the negative before the positives. education, a lot of times, you see districts that are doing quite well that have public confidence, having, you see a connection between public confidence in districts that are doing quite well. you see in education, in some ways, the only opportunity in a capitalist democracy that is provided to all kids. different in different states but provided to all kids. you see a service that is really about hope, not fear. so there's kind of like, a kind of dissidents between those of us that are in education and

those people around that are reporting about it or thinking about it in the kind of negativity. well, collective organ does is it actually is the vehicle by which -- what collective bargaining does is the vehicle to create not just economic dignity for people, but to actually create voice to enable the tools and conditions that teachers need. and that's what collective bargaining has done in districts that have actually worked effectively, both here and abroad. and that gets missed in this entire debate. so for example, in new haven, there is, they really, one of the most innovative interesting contracts in a long time, because the actual is collective bargaining to problem solve. in toledo, in the last few months, with the cuts that they had, they used collective

bargaining to problem solve. in baltimore to use collective bargaining to problem solve. now, that's different than the whole issue in terms of pensions and things like that because a lot of that was actually statutory. not done through collective bargaining. my point is, when actually the public was confronted with should people's rights be stripped away, wisconsin, ohio, two-thirds of the public in the winter said no. ..

>> separate and apart from the collective bargaining issues around the country, the other underlying issue that's very, very disturbing is voting suppression, voting rights. there have been many states that have actually, and many of these new republican governors, who have actually attempted to change voting rights in a lot of these states. so that is happening at the very same time people like you and others are talking about pensions, 36 states have changed pension laws to create more contributions on behalf of or on the part of employees. take a place like wisconsin. that was done, but at the same time there were tax cuts in capital gains. so where is the fairness here? when you have entities like ge who pay, actually, less taxes as

a corporation than a wisconsin custodian. where's the fairness when the wisconsin governor says, oh, we need to go after this in terms of benefits when the average benefit, pension benefit across the nation is about $400, $450 a month? where with's the fairness -- where's the fairness when that happens, and yet no one in this fiscal issue on your side of the debate talks about taxing, you know, billionaires? >> all right. so lots of different things to pick up on here. i want to, i think one of the things nick was arguing with taking this collective bargaining off the table for these local school boards is these local school boards are often elected by the unions. union is a driver in getting school board members elected, and we have do an example -- have an example where they will

get them out of the next election. so if that is a dynamic, doesn't it make sense to say, well, that is some kind of perversion of democracy so we have to address it by taking some of these rights away or moving it to mayoral control or something like that? >> well, look, we actually -- first off, we now argue using the exceptions to make the case. there have been lots and lots of elections throughout whether it's school board elections, whether it's, you know, senatorial elections where lots of people have gotten engaged. i've often seen the role of the union exaggerated when it comes to elections of school boards or other kinds of, other kinds of things. and i've watched, now, the role of money in all of this totally and completely change the relationship everywhere.

now, people should have a right to engage politically. that is part of our democracy. but separate and apart from that, take those situations like merrill control versus elected school boards. is there any positive proof that any one of these structures were better than any other of these structures? is, you know, i've watched merrill -- we supported in new york city pre-mayor bloomberg may yoral control, the union doesn't support that. because we thought that we needed to have a more cohesive accountability system. i suspect that when, um, this version of merrill control expires, there'll be very little support for it because of the way it was used. and the same thing, you could say the same thing about everything. if there is, if a district is

not focused on how we educate kids in a real way for the knowledge economy, they're going to be called into account. and everybody's going to be called into account. and, frankly, what we've been saying is let's all step up and try to do far more to deal with the real issues which are how do we as the economy races forward and the, and we see so many different differences in terms of the knowledge and skill that kids need at the very same time as the bottom is still falling out for regular folk, how do school districts engage? that's the real issue. >> now, rick, what do you think of randi when she says we are trying to balance the budgets on the backs of kids and teachers who are making huge salaries, why aren't we talking on the right about taxing in the upper brackets as a big part of the

solution too? >> well, the reality is we've been living beyond our means as a nation and these individual states -- >> you've got to use the mic. >> so the reality is we've been living beyond our means for 20-plus years. in 2009 pension funds, pensions were underfunded by 1.26 billion national according to pew. at the federal level we're spending a trillion and a half more than we have right now, so we absolutely are going to be raising taxes. in fact, if we went ahead and did the tax increases that president obama suggested this summer, taxing corporate jets, you know, putting an end to the bush tax cuts for the rich families making more than $250,000 a year, that would raise about $85 billion next year. now, given that we're going to borrow one and a half trillion, that would mean we were only borrowing 1.4 trillion against the future next year.

um, if we -- now, of course, that would also mean that our top marginal tax rates for families making 250 plus in your average state are going to be about 55%. we can certainly take them higher. that's 55% when you add up the federal rate they're paying, their state rate and their social security contributions. now, if you go ahead and take that higher which is certainly feasible, with 70% of each dollar earned when president reagan came into office over a certain point there were concerns that you actually start to discourage economic productivity among people when they're paying 65 or 70 cents on the dollar to state, local, federal government. but you can certainly go this. the reality, though, is even if we do these tax increases, that's maybe bringing in $300 billion a year which is terrific except that it means we're still spending $1.2 trillion we don't have each year for the foreseeable future. so i'm absolutely sympathetic to

the point that we're going to have to generate more revenues, but the notion that if we do so that will alleviate the need to dial back unaffordable promises is nothing but a fairy tale. we also need to take a look at unaffordable promises that have been made by irresponsible politicians over the past 20 or 30 years, and that is going to address both national entitlements like social security and medicare and, also, state-level entitlements like pensions and health care. and so i'm sympathetic to randi's point that we need to be talking about all of this, i totally agree, but the reality is that we are going to have a choice very shortly, and we have it right now where the marginal dollar in tax dollars at the state and local level isn't going to go into the classroom to educate our kids, or is it going to pay retirement promises in terms of pensions and health care to retirees? and, frankly, i know which side of that issue i'm on. >> so we have a, and this is a

really, this is, this may be far afield from what instructional practices teachers should use to implement the common core, but there is a constant macro and micro issue that we're all facing. and, you know, as rick was saying, i recollected back to we had in our union a pension task force to deal with a lot of these issues. and one of the things you saw was, a, the fairly modest pensions that are done in the public sector, um, still cost a whole bunch of money. and the issue becomes when the market goes wild as it's been going right now, um, how is that, how are the pension costs sustained. and one of the things we said was let's have a modern pension system. so no spiking, no -- there

should be constant contributions in terms of both employers and employees. but this is the point that i think rick is missing in all of this. there have been modest salaries in the public sector, and retirement benefits are part of those salaries. the macro point is this for america, what happens ten or twenty years from now when no one has a retirement benefit? and people are 70 and 80 years old? what happens? and what you see in the polling that we've done and others is huge retirement insecurity. so rick is talking about how we solve, how we actually make the situation in terms of retirement insecurity worse by -- on a macro level -- by getting rid of it on a micro level. what we need to actually do is

we need to actually think about what happens many this country concern in this country long term when you have people getting older and older and working until they're, you know, if their 50s or 60s and what happens afterwards. that's, in some ways, the public sector and bargaining solve that by saying modest wages but, also, deferred compensation in terms of pensions. and that's a big, that's a big long-term problem. >> okay. one more point, then we're going to turn the page. >> just two things here. one, i mean, i think randi and i disagree to a fair bit on how modest teacher compensation is. median teacher pay in the u.s. is $54,000. fully loaded it's somewhere in the low 70s. $54,000 is higher than median salary. it depends on, now, one's benchmarks in terms of how do

you comparables. but let's also keep in mind that the typical teacher work year is 190 days instead of 235 or 240, so i think there's a discussion here when reasonable people could come at this in different ways. the second thing is i think randi's exactly right, the real issue here is long term. for instance, one relatively simple way to start talking about getting retiree health care and pensions under control in the public sector for teachers and to protect -- [inaudible] is to take the norm of teacher retirement from 30 years to 40 years in pension systems so that teachers are expected to retire at about 65 rather than 55 or 57 which is, of course, a legacy of a much earlier era when we thought of public sector pensions as fitting a very different demographic profile in terms of how long we expected to live. so i certainly think randi's

right that there is good and serious room for people to talk about how do we build these solutions in ways that work, but i suspect that if randi were to try to put together before a team of even, you know, admirable aft teach the notion that they ought to extend by another decade their anticipation of career longevity in order to qualify for full benefits that it would not be received particularly warmly. >> so, you know, i'm giggling as you're talking about that because at the same time as some of the, as we've seen those proposals, we've also seen proposals that say, um, let's look at experience, and let's be fairly negative about experience, and let's just have, you know, younger -- which i don't actually subscribe to. i subscribe to we need newer teachers, and we need experienced teachers, and we need that kind of balance, and that kind of balance in a school

is fantastic. but, so you can't actually on the one hand say, um, teachers should actually work longer and on the other hand say, but by the way, we're actually not going to give them the opportunity to work longer. there are a lot of teachers that actually work 30, 40 years. there are also folks who at their 20th or 25th year, um, say i have to do something else. or i'm tired. and, frankly, one of the things that we need to do is we need to actually do things like have different kinds of career ladders for teachers so that you can do something different with those skills. i do actually think we are losing huge, i mean, at the very same time as skill and knowledge is so important, we need to maintain that kind of experience. but i'm not saying that we don't have to confront pension issues and long-term retirement security issues and long-term

health security issues. but, you know, teachers are not gazillionaires. and what they do as part of the benefit package if you're actually planning for retirement and saving for retirement, that is really good for the economy, and that is really good for a community. um, but the last thing i want to say is this on economics. i think there's a fundamental misstatement that happens, and we saw it in the debt ceiling debate, about debt. last, the last, um, democratic president, um, in the united states of america actually ended his presidency not with a debt, but with a surplus. and that was, i don't know, a decade or so ago. what is the fundamental reason that we have the debt that we have right now? we have three wars that we're engaged in the right now.

we have tax cuts that were never paid for. and we have a prescription drug benefit that was never paid for. so there's a bunch of different reasons why we're in the crisis that we're in. a lot of it is not because of the education spending that we have done over the course of time. and, frankly, what's happened is that we will actually disinvest from our kids at the very same time as the economy is changing and then say that the promises were made -- deferred pension -- to people who actually worked in this field when there was moderate salaries should not be paid. something is just fundamentally off about that. >> so just two points here. one, i mean, i think randi makes a nice point which is one that i think we reformers often give short shrift which is that teachers have entered the profession with an implicit

understanding. this also comes up when we talk about how we're going to treat seniority in terms of classroom assignment that teachers who have been in the field 10, 15, 20 years absolutely entered the field with an understanding about compensation and benefits. and randi's right, any of us when we think we've got one set of deals on the table and people come in and self-righteously tell us it doesn't work, there's absolutely, you know, i think any of us would feel we were being dealt dirty. just a second point here, you know what? i can't remember. so let's leave it at that. >> all right, good. we need to get back to some of these other issues, but this is very helpful. some of the things i'm hearing in terms of agreement so far, you both are against demagoguery. [laughter] that you both agreed that we act in wisconsin's case, there was some evidence they were willing to deal, though rick's point was that would only have an impact

in the short term, and there were longer term issues. and that this retirement situation is a big issue and that, i think, perhaps, you know, you both agreed that there's concern that to solve the debt crisis there's going to be disinvestment from kids. i mean, there's this sort of intergenerational concern gown on right now that we might be continuing to transfer wealth from the young to the old. >> actually, that was the point i wanted to make just real quick that i think, unfortunately, because we have made these expansive promises, we're in a position where we're having to dial back, diagnose back investments in all -- dial back investments in all kinds of areas we care about, and partly because that's we've made bloated and unwise commitments to the elderly. frankly, when we started medicare 45 years ago, the poverty rate among the elderly was substantially higher than it was among america's children. today the poverty rate among the elderly is about half of what it is among america's children, and

what we are doing is we have tied up substantial resources in spending dollars on the over 65s, and i think the pension and health care conversation, education is part of it. i agree entirely with randi that, you know, if we're serious about doing right by our kids in educational improvement, we want to be putting more dollars into the kids partly because it's a good investment and partly because it's the right thing to do, but we also need to have the intestinal fortitude to say that we can't do everything in the world that it would be swell to do. and one of the things this requires is we have to take a hard look at what we have promised we're going to do for the elderly. >> all right. i don't want to get too much into a social security and medicare debate. but i think there's clear disagreement. and randi's point about the sort of race to the bottom versus race to the top -- >> right. >> -- the concern that says let's not get to the point where we're saying let's have retirement insecurity for everybody. >> right.

and then, look, this is a really interesting economic discussion we're having. um, on a macro level. and it wouldn't surprise rick that i come from a keynesian belief that you have to actually create jobs. and try to figure out ways of filling those jobs. but, you know, one of the things i'm haunted by right now is that at the same time as we have this, you know, 9, 10% unemployment, 9% unemployment rate regardless of what the effective unemployment rate is for folks, there are three million jobs available in the united states of america that are not filled. because of the skill mismatch. and that's the kind of thing that we should be working on on a micro level right now. it's the kind of thing that if we actually had in different communities, you know, what are the business needs, what are the

skills of people, are there ways of kind of creating a match, or is there a role for community colleges and others to create maybe some wrap around services around schools in order to do that? these are the kinds of problems that america should be able to solve right now as opposed to, you know, ultimately, simply thinking about the big macro

>> there's a tremendous amount of capital in pension funds throughout the country. let's use it for infrastructure, let's use it to create jobs, let's use it for some of the things we need to do. let's do things differently now that america used to do. we are so timid about doing kind of new, big things. so that's one of our ideas, and that's one of the things we've talked to pension funds around the country about. >> okay. by the way, for those of you

watching online, you can send us questions. we're going to get to questions in a little bit. you can ask a question on twitter using the hash tag wrtt when reform touches teachers, or e-mail us at questions at ed excellence.net. let me get back to this question about teachers feeling under attack, okay? and fundamentally, let me ask you this, randi, is there any way for reformers to promote the kinds of changes we're talking about here, right? curtailing pension benefits and health care benefits and changing evaluations and making jobs less secure? is there any way of reformers promoting that agenda that is not going to make teachers feel under attack? in other words, is this a -- like, these policies they're just not going to like, or is it a communications failure? >> well, mike, if policies are how can we take something from you as opposed to how can we

make education better, but if it's framed as we're going to take something there you -- from you, then of course there's going to be reaction to that. if these are policies that say let's start with what the kids immediate to know and be able -- what the kids need to know and be able to do in the 21st century and how we're going to help some kids, not all kids, get there, then that is an engagement strategy that everyone should want to be involved in. >> but isn't that the steven brill point, okay, we all love kids -- >> actually, you know, i love -- i did bring one prop because, you know, i am really -- it's actually hard to create a trusting, innovative environment. i've been, i've been a boss for a long time. i've been a boss at the, you know, in the uft, i was the president and the, um, from 1999

to 2008. at the american federation of teacher, i've been the president from 2008 until now. that's managed a lot of people, been a boss for a long time. it is much harder as a boss to actually try to build a culture of trust and innovation and to collaborate. it's much easier to bark an order. it's much less effective to bark an order, and it's much more effective to do this. this is not "kumbaya." and when people talk about it as "kumbaya", it trivializes our work. and so the issue in terms of teachers is they are on the ground actually being the ones who implement all of these high-minded policies that we talk about. and so the question becomes how do you engage them in that implementation? the implementation is often the hardest -- even things that we

would all agree on; teachers should be qualified whether you call it effective or qualified. okay, how do you make that happen? how do can you insure that that's real? how do you insure -- take another policy. i think on this stage we probably, i'm not sure, but i think we probably agree that there should be high standards for children. and i think we probably agree -- [laughter] there should be high expectations -- [laughter] good. let's get our sandals on. and i think -- and the guitar. and i think we probably agree -- [laughter] there should be, you know, that there should be some curriculum, you know? the some of us may agree that there should be common core, some of of us may not. but how do you then insure that that happens? and so if you, the we engaged in the conversation that way, that

would be one thing. but if we engage in the conversation saying i'm about to tell you that you have to work harder and, but, you know, but i'm lopping off 20% of your salary because nobody can afford itand you should be just happy that you have a job, that's not going to be pleasant conversation with anyone, and worse, it's going to be hugely demoralizing, and i think it's going to be a step backward, not a step forward. >> rick, what do you think about this? >> so i think randi's right. when you tell people they're not going to get as much as they're used to getting or they think they're entitled to, they're going to be upset. and, unfortunately, i think that's a position that feckless leadership has gotten us to. i think there's two strands of reform here. one strand is the kinds of things that are directly centered on instruction, on pedagogy, on scope and sequence and all the stuff where teachers know more about it than anybody who's sitting on the outside

looking in. and there i think it makes all the sense in the world to approach these things in a collaborative fashion where we are giving teachers opportunities to lend their expertise, to shape what we're doing and then holding them accountable. >> by the way, would you support what randi was saying about getting some of that stuff into collective bargaining agreements? >> no. no, absolutely not. i think it ought to happen outside the framework of collective bargaining because i think it frames it unproductively and unhelpfully. one important kind of disagreement there is whether it's useful to do that in terms of collective bargaining or not. friends of ours, julie coppic, chuck kisher in have talked about united mine workers for the a long time. i am deeply skeptical that this stuff works out the way it's supposed to. randi, obviously, has a different opinion. one of the things i wish to god we could do more effectively is

recognize that same people can look at the same facts and experiences and come to different conclusions without necessarily imagining that the other person must have nefarious motives. that said, there's one strand of reform where i agree very much on principle with randi even if i would disagree about how we would go about it. but there's a second strand when it comes to staffing ratios, when it comes to benefits, when it comes to compensation structures where, you know, what we're doing is talking about saying to teachers we have increased nominal per-pupil spending threefold since -- excuse me, after inflation since the early '70s, most of this money has gone into hiring more warm bodies. we've got from a 23 to 1 student ratio in 1973 to about a 15 to 1 student ratio today. this has necessitated more

bodies that we can't train adequately. i would like to see fewer educators, but at the end of the day educators may not feel this is a good trade-off, and these kinds of policy determinations are going, are frequently, i think, going to have to happen whether or not teachers are comfortable with them. >> and i, look, i think on the economics i actually, um, i'm actually troubled by some of the kind of global spending, um, conclusions that i hear all the time. because when you impact the numbers, you see what that spending is for. we've had a 50% increase from the early '80s to now in terms of special needs children. and the spending on special needs children, um, is higher than the spending on children that don't have special needs. now, is that an important value? probably so. but that's what, um, that's what

some of that number is. also what's interesting is that in the countries that outcompete us, when you actually unpack their spending, retirement and health benefits are not in their equation, and that's about, as rick has said, that's about 13%. so it's an apples to oranges comparison. and when you take that out of the comparison, the numbers in terms of as a percentage of gdp, excuse me, look more similar. the issue, though, is what is this actual spending on teachers for? and what we've actually seen on the ground is that class sizes having gone down so that if you're a high school teacher, for example, you're working with 150 to 200 kids a day. and how are you going to have the engagement to insure, again,

i'm going back to what do kids know and need to be able to do in the global economy. how are you going to create the environment that creates innovation and creativity and critical thinking with 150 to 200 kids so that when we hear rick's numbers about, you know, the student/teacher ratios have gone down like that, what we're seeing on the ground is an increase of testing coordinators, an increase of people who are engaged in standardized test issues, an increase in those kinds of things as opposed to the things that, again, i'll go back to the tools. this is part of the reason why if we use collective bargaining the right way, and this is where i also think that rick is right, the contracts become really unflexible. the biggest challenge i think we have, um, is something that shanker said a long time ago. i said in 2004 or '5, shanker

said beforehand, feldman, also one of my successors, mark tucker has just said recently how do we actually change schools to, how do we change schools from this industrial model to a knowledge model? and how do we use collective bargaining in if a class model? how do we actually do these kinds of things? so what i would like to see is let's try some of these experiences. green dot was one of the experiments we tried in the terms of seeing how you can mesh. in a 360-degree accountability system a lot of the tools teachers need, how do you mesh this? and i think given that we have this, you know, huge, um, this 15,000 school districts in the united states, 100,000 schools in the united states. we could try some of this kind of experimentation in a way to see can we, can we build on new systems? not the entire new system, but

can we build some experiment places? >> >> a hot like charter schools. >> well, it was supposed to be a lot of what charter schools were, but look what they've become. they pretty much look like the regular system without contracts. in so many different places. take -- and i'll stop here -- but take something that was mentioned today in the times. luis and chris ghiardelli actually did something about extended time talking about the edwards middle school. it's not extended time, per se, but how they use it. and the way in which they use extended time to create -- i've been at that school -- to create, it's a very shared leadership school. there's the union is very engaged in that school. they use the extended time to engage kids and to, um, use data correctly.

so the point here is how do you actually use collective bargaining to try to break through this industrial model, come up with different kinds of models and get the kind of tools and conditions but use collective bargaining as a leveraging agent to make that kind of better mix? >> okay. i want to get to one issue and then get the audience in here. teacher evaluations in this larger issue of finding a way to weed out low performers and terminate them if they're not doing their job. >> right. >> a lot of people say, look, this is what a lot of these discussions come down to. we have a system where we cannot in a timely or, you know, cost effective way remove ineffective teachers from the classroom. i mean, rick, would you say that this is what the whole teacher evaluation push at the end of the day is about? >> yeah. i think in large part. and i think it's been driven by the fact -- and, again, you know, much like with the

problems with district giveaways in terms of benefits and restrictions that reformers have gotten into this habit of scapegoating unions while letting feckless school boards and superintendents off the hook. [laughter] i think once again this is a case of that. if you look at the new teacher project widget works, for instance, and we see 99% of teachers being evaluated satisfactory, that is not on the unions. that is on the fact that we have timid, tepid, feckless management in the school leadership post and superintendent seats who are failing at their first obligation which is to identify ineffective educators and either see that they improve or that they are no longer in front of class rooms. when reformers then throw this all on the unions i think, a, they're mistaken. b, i would love to see -- i do think that, unfortunately, the aft and nea then wind up sharing some of the cull built because i would like to see them calling

out feckless school leaders and superintendents, and i don't think they do so. and i think that is because there is too often a convenient horse of compromise among school boards, superintendents, teachers and principals, in which nobody agrees nobody should be called to account. and i think in that way everybody winds up owning responsibility. but, sure. so as we talk about the teacher evaluation systems, there's really two ways to go about it. one is, to me, a robust, sensibly-articulated system in which we are building a lot of room for managerial judgment, in which we are taking into account full evaluation including how much they contribute to their teams in which they work, in which we are rigorously and systematically soliciting information on they're responding promptly and supportively to parental queries and parental needs. but, unfortunately, i think

policymakers are deeply concerned they can't trust school leaders to make good or responsible judgments, and we've heard from the union that they're concerned school leaders are going to make politicized or capricious judgments. so what we've wound up with is a compromise which is relatively simplistic, one size fits all state level evaluation systems which turn very heavily on simple value-added calculations. i don't think anybody thinks this is a particularly good or el gabt solution, it just seems to me the one solution where we default to because nobody -- because few people like the status quo, and nobody seems to be in a position or they're comfortable trusting the judgment of school leaders. >> so -- >> so -- >> let me ask on specifics. we have here in the district of columbia the impact system. begin, it's not perfect, we're still in early days, it needs to be tweaked, but it has led to hundreds of teachers losing

their jobs, and there's a sense among the greater community that, okay, we finally have accountability in d.c. public schools, we have teachers who were failing kids for a long time, and something's happened to them. what's wrong with that? >> so, frankly, my understanding is that the last superintendent or last -- the second to last -- no, no. the superintendent before michelle rhee, chris janeny actually fired more teachers than the impact system has done. and yet that factoid never gets out there. so, but let's, let's take this back. first off, evaluation systems have been broken. for a lot of the reasons that, um, that rick said before which is it's really hard to actually fire people. and so what happens is people don't -- and blame something else. they'll blame tenure, they'll

blame other things. it's hard. it's a hard thing to do. >> you mean it's hard and people don't like to do it. >> it's hard because people don't like to do it. people don't like to look somebody else in the ideas -- in the eyes and say, you're fired. >> or you're doing a lousy job. >> or you're doing a lousy job. there are some people who do like that, but most of us don't. [laughter] >> [inaudible] >> right, right. i do, um -- >> [inaudible] >> so let's not go through the list of the people who do though. so, but actually what the union did, what our union did, um, and you both know this, is that we actually spent some time in the last couple of years saying, okay, how do we do this. so we saw that you can't just take -- we used to actually do what rick suggested, finger

point at administrators, say, you're wrong, say you haven't done what you need to do. we stopped that. what we started doing instead was saying let's figure out what is the right way to do this. and number one, we know that confidence matters. any schoolteacher you talk to will tell you that they want teachers teaching side by side with them who know their stuff. and know how to engage kids. and love kids. and so, you know, the first iteration that our union tried in terms of getting at this was through a peer review process. and some school districts did it, and some school districts didn't. but second iteration in this generation that we've tried to do is that we said this january 2010 after a lot of work with our leaders and looking at evaluation systems is that this drive-by evaluation of an

administer sitting in your classroom for 20 minutes once a year, twice a year doesn't work. but also the test score evaluation doesn't work either. and particularly given that this generation of test scores don't actually align to what kids need to know and be able to do. having said that, we need to have evaluations that both measure what teachers are doing in the class room, how they engage, but also whether or not kids have learned. what am i teaching and whether or not kids have learned. and so we've actually tried to come up with a framework that does that, that includes to some extent -- you all know this because this is the only thing that got any attention -- that includes student learning and test scores. but also includes practice. and there are about 100 districts including, you know, pittsburgh and hillsborough and others that are using this kind of evaluation system. it's very different than impact

in two respects. number one, the system we're talking about is not simply about sorting, it is primarily about supporting teachers to grow their craft. and number two, it is something that was done with teachers, not to teachers. >> so if you got your ideal system in place, randi, in one of these cities, at the end of the day it supports all of that. >> right. >> but still there's going to be some teachers that don't make the grade. >> absolutely right. >> what would you guess s that 5% of the teachers? 10% in a typical district? >> if i came up with a -- if i said any percentage of that, the blogs all around town are going to be weingarten said x percentage of teachers should be fired. >> right -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> so, look, what happens if you have a really good evaluation system that has credibility and all of a sudden two teachers are

fired in if a district or 2,000 teachers are fired? the real issue becomes is there creditability for -- credibility for that system? is and, frankly, that's what we need. and we're in a huge r&d crisis right now, and i think the bottom falling out of the economy and school, state and local budgets is going to make this worse, not better. about a year or two ago i was much more optimistic because this is really time intensive. and any principal who doesn't say that is someone who's not telling the truth. it is, if you actually want to spend some time really doing good evaluations, a principal has to -- or whoever the mentor is or whoever the evaluator is, you sit with a teacher. you say, okay, what are you trying to accomplish in this lesson? you watch the lesson. you sit with somebody after the lesson, say, did we accomplish that? you then talk about what else you need to do. you look at student data to say did i actually, did kids actually get what i was trying

to teach? was there that kind of engagement? so the real issue, the issue that's never on the table here is that if we want to have really good evaluation systems like they do in singapore which is about continuous improvement, yes, it's about sorting people that ought not where in the profession -- that ought not be in the profession and do procedures have to be really quick. but if you really want to do this right, it takes a lot of time, and that kind of time costs money, and that is where are we going to find that investment to do that? >> make it quick. [laughter] >> so, okay, two points. one, i think the issue here is like the one we raised before that when it comes to evaluation as a formative tool, absolutely, i think there's a hugely constructive role for dealing teachers in, and i think systems in which how, you know, especially using today's relatively crude value-added metrics incorporating that

without building these systems, um, so that they rest on that is smart and healthy. um, but i think just like we talked about before there are also things teachers are just going to resist. i think when we start talking about using those even thoughtfully-constructed systems to terminate teachers, make sure the union if it doesn't represent the good teachers, in legal responsibility it has to represent all teachers who are members, and it is simply difficult, i think, to convince all teachers to be enthusiastic about removing low performers. so i think there is going to be much more room for collaboration on the formative side of it than on the removal muscle side. >> but that's why we have embed inside the process we're doing -- look, i'm not saying that this is easy, but our union and our membership at our last national convention adopted this evaluation framework. and when we actually put all the pieces together, our executive council adopted this. i'm not saying it's easy.

but we represent all teachers. you have to make sure the teachers are treated fairly, but i think it disserves teachers as well as communities in which they live in work when one says that the union's job is only to deal with the back end. the union's job is to help them get the tools and conditions that they need, that they would not be able to get alone. but bill gates can represent himself quite effectively. same with ely -- [inaudible] but an individual teacher without that kind of collective work can't. i'm not saying, rick, that you're wrong about this in terms of how hard it is, but i'm saying there are unions all across this country -- new haven, baltimore, abc, toledo, new york city -- who have actually confronted this and said, look, we have to be about fairness, but we have to be about quality. >> and, okay.

let's, let's get some questions. we're going to start with press. we have a couple of members of the press here, and we will give them first priority first. are there any members of the press who would like to ask a question? yes, no? anybody? okay. then we will open it up more broadly. >> we've got a question from twitter here, this is from greg who's twittering, and this question is for randi. if unemployment is at 9% and three million jobs are open due to skills mismatch, doesn't that point to the need for college and career-ready standards? >> um, yes, it, of course, points to that. but, frankly, i don't want to wait 12 years to try to figure that out. let's figure out how in a community right now where there are jobs available how we see how we can reskill people to get to those jobs. >> with okay. we have a question in the back. by the way, please, tell us who you are, where you're from, and

if you can keep your comment to 140 characters or less like they do on twitter, that would be excellent. [laughter] >> let me just say for the record here that i am also for reskilling and getting people matched into good jobs. >> excellent. we have a long policy agenda now. [laughter] >> okay. that's a challenge to me, mike, right? linda mckay, international learning services. i'm going to direct a question to randi. in working with teachers, one of the things i hear is they want evaluations beyond the test scores, and especially some of the things that you mentioned including a culture for learning for students coming to school, for doing their work, for believing they can learn, yet people call that the soft skills you can't evaluate. but teachers are saying that's a huge piece of success for them. >> right. >> does your evaluation that you've developed speak to that? >> yes. >> and could you elaborate a tiny bit? is. [laughter] >> look, the frameworks that we've spoke spoken to are also t creating a culture and a climate

for innovation and for, um, opportunity to grow. and so there are things that need to happen. which is, um, how do you actually have the tools and conditions so that -- or let's even talk about time. how is there the time to insure that kids are actually engaged with one another in productive work doing teamwork kind of work, things that are not tested on standardized tests, doing the kind of critical thinking and problem solving that is so necessary in this very fast-paced knowledge economy that we're in. and so it's, part of the framework is are, is the environment, um, is there opportunity to create that kind of environment. and the way in which we try to test this in plain english is through something we call

360-degree accountability meaning t not just accountability -- meaning it's not just accountability up to down, but it's accountability down to up. do people have the tools and conditions that they need to, um, have an environment for kids. the best way i can explain it, you know, most people go to it as saying, you know, our schools, um, safe and orderly places. are there, you know, are there the kind of wrap around services that kids may need. and i am really delighted that in the columbus school, one of the schools you're doing, because one of our first issues were whether or not wrap around services were important, and i'm really delighted that one of the fordham schools is going to have one of those wrap around services in columbus. so dealing with the kind of answer we need that kids may have or dealing with kind of how do you deal with, how do you teach the soft skills, that's part of our evaluation system,

creating the opportunity. last thing i'll say on this is people get this in business. i watched rahm emanuel at the last, um, clinton global initiatives give a greeting, and the greeting was about chicago and about his role being to create an environment that was conducive to grow business. a principal and a superintendent's role is also to help create an environment that is conducive to learning. and that's part of our, um, that's part of our evaluation. >> you mentioned the superintendent's role. stephen brill thinks he should be superintendent of the new york schools. >> i've heard. [laughter] >> let me, i'm going to do a quick round -- >> i have a great job that i love right now. >> it's going to be called the weakest link. i'm going to ask which of you what i think is the weakest part of your argument. i'll start with you, rick. you say we should give managers more discretion, yet most places

they have full discretion today to terminate untenured teachers, and yet they almost never do. so isn't that a big problem with your whole theory about trusting front line leaders and managers? >> yeah, huge. [laughter] this is, actually -- and this is why we're winding up with these relatively crude, relatively simplistic one size fits all state systems because school leaders, district leaders haven't earned anybody's confidence that they will actually go ahead and use the discretion that they're given, so reformers and policymakers rather than default to these judgments are saying, heck with it, we're going to write these relatively automatic trigger into state law, and teachers -- whatever kind of the complicating factors on the site -- are going to be l evaluated and even removed based on relatively simple measures. >> okay. randi, four words: last-in, first-out. indefensible, right? >> >> um, seniority was a proxy for

fairness. one of the things that evaluation systems will do will be to make last-in, first-out moot. the only, the only regret i have with the way in which this debate has gone on in the last six months is it's obfuscated the whole impact of large amounts of layoffs on children. and what we're starting to see in school districts -- first off, we saw a bunch of unions actually find ways to, um, mitigate the layoffs and mitigate the cuts to student services. whether you're talking about toledo, new york city -- >> okay, yeah. >> but it mitigated, it obfuscated the fact that there are real impacts with this level and magnitude of layoffs.

in the absence of this level and magnitude of layoffs, real evaluation will mean that experience matters to some extent, but you're not going to have, um, you're not going to have an impact of last-in, first-out. >> so once the evaluation systems are going, you would be willing to say good-bye to last-in, first-out? is. >> what we're saying is you're not going to, that nobody's going to call that question anymore because if you're really about evaluation -- >> well, they called the question because there's still state laws that say you must use last-in, first-out. >> but if there's confidence that -- so the question is this: if there are similarly-situated people who have actually performed well, similarly situated who have performed well, in that situation experience should matter. that's what i'm saying is that if people really believed that teachers were all effective and

there was an effective evaluation system, this issue would be moot. that's what i'm saying. >> gotcha. all right. let's do one more from the audience. why don't we go over here. say your name, who you are, ask your question, make it short. >> hi, my name is lindsay, i'm from the house committee on education in the work force. and i guess my question more generally, we've touched on this a little bit, what is, then, the federal role in a lot of these reforms that you're talking about be it teacher evaluations, be it collective bargaining, what is the federal role here? >> for me, i mean, i think there's a huge opportunity for the feds to do more harm than good. so when i hear people, you know, i think highly-qualified teaching language has been a negative. when i hear some of the advocacy groups starting to talk about highly effective teachers and ask school leaders, i start to get nervous feelings in the base of my spine. [laughter] i think the most useful place here is when the feds are

incentivizing states to act, particularly title ii dollars, as we talk, say, about the no child left behind reauthorization. that there are opportunities here to provide political cover to superintendents and to state leaders and to union leaders to do some of what randi's talking about, to step forward, past these mechanism systems that were designed when we had no way to define a good teacher there a bad teacher, when we were uncertain as to what good outcomes looked like and when we could, frankly, get all the talent we wanted because college-educated women were becoming teachers because nothing else was open to them, so we didn't have to worry about talent. i think states and districts need to reengineer their systems, and i think, frankly, in terms of how we'd try to get there, randi and i have some points of agreement.

and i'd like to see the government providing opportunities for states and districts that came forward with the boldest plans to focus on quality, to focus on smarter use of the talent they've got, to focus on removing ineffective educators. i'd like to see them in a position to compete for dollars to support plans that they're devising rather than see them coming forward with plans which pledge that they are going to be able to fulfill conditions that the federal government is going to lay out in a particularly prescriptive fashion. >> any areas of agreement with rick? >> this is, look, i think rick is -- we may disagree with what those look like, but i think rick is right about that. and i think that -- but there's one other role that the federal government has, and if you look at what, um, kennedy thought about, johnson did in terms of the fea, it is that esea was originally a about kids who were

being left behind and how do we create equity. and that is a really important role. because we have to -- if we really actually believe in opportunity for all, we have to actually act like that. and so there's that role, and there's also the role of trying to create opportunity to create evidence-based systems of things that work. because, ultimately, if we have evidence of what works, then we can do the kind of sustaining and scaling up that is so important. i think one of the toughest things in the education these days is that when we, that we never scale up that which works. we rarely sustain it, and we never scale it up. um, and we don't know how to balance between the local autonomy that's so essential in education plus a need to insure that all kids have a certain foundational base of knowledge

so that they're prepared for what, um, comes in front of them. >> okay. >> live, now, to the heritage foundation this morning where experts have studied global terrorism trends for the past 40 years. national security experts today will explain their report, the data and implications for u.s. counterterrorism policy. this is just getting underway. p.m.

here winning the long war, lessons from the cold war for defeating terrorism and preserving freedom. please join me welcoming my colleague jim carafano. jim? [applause] >> let me thank all of you for coming. numbers are important and they really matter and they also can be horribly abused. there is argument. why are we worrying about terrorism? if you look look at the numbers you're more likely to get struck by a meteor than terrorists. more people die whatever than terrorism. this is way overblown. we shouldn't spend money on this those numbers are true. they are absolutely irrelevant. terrorism is not about killing people. as dave talks 9/11 is an aberration, per capita it is one of the most horrific

terrorist events in modern times. terrorism is not about killing people. it is about threaten a way of life and driving political change through the slaughter of innocents. you treat it differently than a car accident and it is significant. there are people threaten our way of life. mom are not trying to kill us in the hundreds of thousand us but they want to kel us in tens of thousands or millions and those are numbers that make a world-changing difference. numbers are important but they're important in context. that's what i hope this event is all about. let me ask all the stupid 9/11 questions up front, right and we can get to the real work. are we safer? of course we're safer. when david and jeff talk about empirically if you look at the numbers we are safer than we were on september 10th, 2001. it is demonstrably proveable. we are. america is harder target than it was 10 years ago. are we safe? of course we're not safe.

we live in a country with infinite number of vulnerabilitis. if we spend a gazillion numbers of dollars taking them off the table we live in a country with a gazillion number of vulnerabilities minus one. we are safe given the size of this country and freedoms we enjoy here. are we going to be less safe in the future? the answer is, probably. the reason for that because of decisions made by this administration going forward how they deal with counter terrorism are. when president obama came into office there were a lot of analysts says this is bush light, if you got below the rhetoric the administration was actually doing many of the same things that the bush administration had done to combat terrorism. and that is a true statement. that is generally the progress we made on the war on terrorism has continued. but the administration is going in a very different direction than the bush administration and that i think is going to create

grave problems in the future. and i really am concerned if we stay on the new path that this administration has lined out, in two years we'll be back where we were on september 10th, 2001. so today the heritage foundation is releasing an alternative counterterrorism strategy up on our website, heritage.org which is an alternative to this administration's strategy on counterterrorism. i want to talk for a second about the foundation for the strategy because what the strategy is based on empirically what works and what does not work and what we've learned. it is not an assessment what did re learn from 9/11. i get people angry and reflective using 9/11 as a baseline to determine how far we've come. that was interesting but irrelevant. because the world has moved on. the world we live today both in terms of what we do and what evil people are trying to kill us do is significantly different. so truly looking at 9/11 is truly fighting the last war. we have to deal with the threat that we face today and we have to learn from

what we've done in the last 10 years what works and doesn't work in combating terrorism. and that is what we have tried to capture in our strategy, counterterrorism strategy. foundational part of that strategy is really looking at empirically on america's experience in combating terrorism not just over the last 10 years but over the last 40 years. so what i've asked two of our premier analysts to do to talk about some of the empirical research we've done to understand terrorist trends. speaking first will be dave mull haas send. is one of our -- mule haas senl. he will look at data trends taxing in the united states but really globally against u.s. targets here and worldwide really over the 40 year period culminating in 2009. jessica zuckerman who is an analyst in the allison center for foreign policy studies will talk about the

work we've done to track terrorist attacks aimed at the united states since 9/11. what i think i do after they talk and i will come back and talk a bit more about the alternative counterterrorism strategy we've laid out and why we think it is so important. we'll go dave and jess. >> thanks, jim. i thank everybody watching on the internet or c-span. we're at the 10th anniversary of the september 11th terrorist attacks approaching americans will be thinking about terrorism and its consequences while 9/11 was the most significant terrorist attack against the united states there's been many other terrorist attacks against our nation and against other nations of the world. today i will present the findings of a heritage foundation for center data analysis report, titled, terror trends, 40 years data on international and domestic terrorism. i coauthored with former heritage analyst, jenna baker mcnile.

the -- mcneil. the data looks at starts with 1969 goes you will the way up to 2009. the data was obtained from the rand database of worldwide terrorism incidents and it only includes terrorist attacks that were successfully carried out. it doesn't account for or consider actually prevented attacks that jessica will be talking about later. while analyzing the data the raw data became more than just numbers and bits of information to me. it got me thinking back to my days growing up in the 1980s where few of these data points represent significant events that made an indelible impression on me going up. one such incident was 1983, beirut marine barracks bombing by hezbollah where we had 241 american servicemen killed and 15 french servicemen killed as well. another incident the 1985 hijacking of the twa

hijacking by lebanese terrorists. in this incident, u.s. navy diver, robert dean stefen was killed. who can forget seeing the videotape, watching this live or watching on nightly news saying the pilot of the airplane, in the window with the terrorists with their guns in the background? made a striking impression on me. another incident was 1985 hijacking of the italian cruise ship achille lauro by palestinian liberation front. where in this case an american who was wheelchair-bound named lee on klinghoffer was brutally killed and thrown into the mediterranean. these are a few of the terrorist attacks recorded in the data set. they're a small sliver a tiny slice of terrorist attacks that occurred worldaway. from 1969 to 2009 there have been 38,000 terrorist attacks against all nations

including the u.s. and of these attacks 8% or 3,000 incidents were against the united states. the remaining 92% or 35,000 incidents were directed against other nations. we just look at international terrorism directed against the united states, nearly 5600 people lost their lives in more than 16, 00 people sufficient suffered injuries during this 40-year time span. in previously mentioned there are 38,000 terrorist events occurred in this 40-year time period. how harmful has terrorism being during this 40-year period? look at fatalities. during this period the average number of fatalities for terrorist attack against a nation other than the united states resulted in about 1.7 incidents. for the united states, the average is about two incidents per terrorist attack. if we exclude september 11th,

that number drops to about one. shows how big september 11th was in just massive amount of people who lost their lives. same holds true for injuries. the average number of injuries resulting from a terrorist attack from a nation other than the united states yields about 3.9 injuries per incident. for the united states the average is about 5.9. if you exclude september 11th, it drops to 5.1 average injuries. so it is obvious that most terrorist attacks aren't as deadly as september 11th but people do die and people are injured. what about regions of the world? what are the targets of terrorism? and so for certain targets of terrorism the united states is disproportionally the object of the act. if you look at military personnel, out of all attacks worldwide against military personnel the united states accounts for 43%. that's a significant portion i think. for diplomatic offices of all attacks against

diplomatic institutions the united states accounts for about 28%. for businesses across the world, when a business is a targeted during 40-year united states accounts for about 24%. so all businesses that were targeted, about 24% of those incidents were against u.s. businesses. so when does terrorism occur against the united states? most acts of terrorism occur outside of our borders which i think is good but the audience, what region of the world, do you think the middle east, or middle east, persian gulf accounts for most terrorist attacks in the region of the world? you do think most terrorist attacks in the middle east and persian gulf, raise your hand? well, actually only about 20%. during this 40-year time period about 36% have occurred in latin america and the caribbean. europe accounts for about

23%, asia, 12%, africa, 4%, and north america, 4%. from 2001 to 2009 how did domestic terrorism and international terrorism compare to each other? during this time period from 2001 to 2009 there were 91 homegrown terrorist incidents of all kind within the united states. as opposed to 380 international terrorist attacks against the united states. during the same period what were the most common targets of international domestic terrorism? the most prevalent u.s. targets of international terrorism was businesses at 27%. and diplomatic offices at 17%. the two most prevalent u.s. targets for domestic terrorism were businesses at 43%, and private citizens and property at 24%. you know, so, domestic international terrorism what was the method, the prefered

method of attack, with international terrorism against the united states, bombings account for 65% of all acts. domestic terrorism the arson is the most frequent and accounts for 46% of all attacks. and so of these 91 domestic homegrown terrorist incidents, arson is the prefered method, and these arson attacks were conducted by left-wing groups such as earth liberation front and the animal liberation front. the human cost of this period during 2001, 2009, we have, look at fatalities injuries. during this period we had 21 fatalities from domestic terrorism and almost 3900 fatalities from international terrorism. so of course this data point of 3900, 9/11 looms large. same holds for injuries, during this time period we had 83 injuries for domestic

terrorism and about 5100 injuries resulting from international terrorism. overview, go into more detail on the report, get it on heritage.org online. i hope this report is helpful for the public and policymakers for understanding the trend in terrorism the last 40 years. >> thank you. jess? >> thanks, jim, 2007 the heritage foundation became the first and only organization tracking terrorist plots against the united states. that year we reported 19 publicly known terrorist attacks against the united states have been thwarted since 9/11. today that up number stands at 40. the fact that the united states has not seen a large-scale domestic attack since 9/11 truly speaks to the counterterrorism successes. simply applauding our achievement and taking forward-looking approach to preventing the next potential attack is not nearly enough. reviewing terror plots

thwarted since 9/11 wan provide valuable information in understanding nature of the threat and preventing the next attack. two the most well-known plots in recent memory are the christmas bomber in 2009 and times square bomber in 2010. these plots made the headlines because these were too close for comfort. thwarted not by the intelligence community or swift response of law forcement but by swift action of the public. along with the shoe-bomber richard reid in 2001 are two examples how every day citizens prevented terrorist attacks n the times square plot bystanders noted suspicious behavior when he tried to detonate a bomb in times square. bystanders immediately reported what they saw to police and luckily shahzad's bomb was faultly and they were able to apprehend him but only after he boarded a plain to dubai. shortly after the times square incident the obama administration hailed the

foiled plot as counterterrorism success story. while technically successful in the sense no one was harmed relying on citizens to detect and thwart a terrorist attack is far from an effective strategy. this does not mean that there is no role for citizens in helping to, helping our overall counterterrorism effort. citizens much like local state and law enforcement know their communities and know when something isn't right. in the 2008 fort dix plot a clerk helped thwart the attack when he saw a video where men were calling for jihad. see something, say something is absolutely essential. while the incidents are well known for their apparent failures the remaining 37 plots were halted through the concerted efforts of u.s. intelligence and law enforcement. just this june, for instance the fbi arrested two men in the seattle warehouse in a plot to attack a local military recruiting center.

in thwarting the attempted attack the see at elpolice department and fbi worked well in coordinating their efforts with the fbi able to enact on information provided to the seattle pd. this incident illustrates perfectly the need for robust participations among federal, state and local law enforcement in counterterrorism matters. such robust participations are equally important on an international level. the terror plot data contain multiple instances where the relationships between the u.s. and its allies were a fundamental part in breaking down plots against the united states and apprehending those responsible. terrorism is truly a global threat. truly every plat against the united states has some sort of international dimension. those who attend terror training camps do so in safe havens around the globe. they use safe havens, recruiting fund-raising and facilitating international travel. those who use visas to come to the united states for malicious purposes do so first through other

countries. while europe also served as a base for recruiting and planning attacks including richard reid, a british citizen who attempted the shoe bombing on a flight from paris to miami, this means american homeland security measures can not begin at the point where the threat already arrived in the united states. programs such as the waiver program which allows for greater information sharing and security cooperation between the u.s. and member nations enhance these counterterrorism efforts. in looking at our 40 bored thwarted plots since 9/11 there are. five post 9/11 targets we've seen most are the new york city, unclear on unnamed targets, washington, d.c., airplanes and airports and finally new jersey. yet despite these clear trends policymakers often try to child proof every potential target against terrorism or focus security too much on airports and the airport screening security lines. neither of these approaches

makes sense. researches for hardening and protection are limited and not practical to think we can put physical security measures at all potential targets at every jurisdiction in the country. likewise since 9/11 of the sing get one of 40 thwarted plots were stopped because the security measures at airport. one of the successful plots was a shooting at ticket counter at lax in los angeles. nevertheless congress poured billions of doll into transportation security measures of the screening lines and introducing confusing measures like three one liquid rule. forcing passengers to undergo full-body scans or pat downs. the fact of the matter once the terrorist is in the screening line the public is already in danger. the real lesson that can be found reviewing all 40 plots that have been foiled since 9/11 that information sharing and intelligence are the absolute cornerstones much effective counterterrorism.

simply throwing money at the problem is rapidly deploying new technologies is not the answer just as relying on luck or quick reaction of american people to protect the united states. continuing american success in fighting terrorism requires deadcation by congress and the executive branch to risk based security focusing on information sharing and intelligence. only in this way can terror plots be stopped before the public is in danger. >> thank you. couple minutes on the our counterterrorism strategy and how it fits into our discussion. i think a lot of people with confusion, probably some things worth he do fining. difference between homeland security at large and anti-terrorism and counterterrorism. homeland security is really about protecting targets, responding to threats. anti-terrorism is really lack of a better term trying to pick the bad guys off as they come through the wire. counterterrorism whether domestic counterterrorism missions or global counterterrorism missions is about proactive going around

and stopping the bad guys before they get to you. that includes everything from taking out leadership to disrupting organizations to frustrating operations and planning to decreasing funding or, fund-raising and recruiting. so, we published earlier this week and we had an event that talked about the homeland security part of that and some of the anti-terrorism part of that. that report is called, homeland security 4.0. that is also up on our website. so here the focus of what we've really looked at is really where the big bang for the buck is. we've been in this business since before 9/11 and repeatedly time and time again, i come back to the argument that the biggest bang for the security buck is in stopping the bad guys to begin with. and so the counterterrorism piece is really essential. now, obviously stopping cancer is the best thing, right? you know, it nice to be able

to treat it and recover from it, right? so you wouldn't do everything in your medical system to just stop cancer because, you know, somebody is still going to get cancer and you have to deal with that and you have to recover from it. likewise i would never say don't spend money ton homeland security and don't have any terrorism measures. if you don't have your investments in counterterrorism right it is like waiting for the cancer to strike. those are important but supplemental efforts. it is important to get them right and that's what homeland security 4.0 is are about the counterterrorism strategy is the about really gill killing cancer. this administration is about to make a very big pivot in its direction in the counterterrorism strategy and it is dead wrong. i don't use the word dead lightly. the problem where the administration is going in the nutshell is they are ceasing to hold the initiative in combating terrorism. so in every conflict there

is offense and defense, right? there is going after the bad guys, trying to score and there sit wag for them to come to you and reacting to that. and if you, if you deconstruct where the administration is going, it is shifting from a proactive strategy to going out and stopping problems, to basically a conservative defensive reactive strategy. and ceding the initiative to the enemy is always a bad idea. so more specifically, there are four fundamental problems that we talk about in the introduction to our strategy with where the administration is going. the first is that they really are consciously trying to revert to the law enforcement paradigm that we had before 9/11. this is the fundamental strategy that we used to combat terrorism in the 1990s which is, treat it as just another law enforcement problem. don't give it the respect of an enemy that is trying to kill you. just treat it like you do murder and fire and arson and everything else. that fundamentally misreads

the enemy that we are facing. they are trying to organize a global insurgency to overthrow free nations around the world. treating that as a simple crime is like treating hitler as a simple crime. the second problem, is, what is going on in afghanistan. the administration simply is intent on prematurely leaving afghanistan. the problem with that, that will create space for the taliban to come back in and restructure a sanctuary in the country. that will provide option for al qaeda to come back in and reconstitute. they will have dual option reconstituting in pakistan or afghanistan. the pakistani commitment to combating terrorism will wane as the u.s. presence declines. the third problem is what i call the small footprint strategy. the administration will never say they will stop combating terrorism over seas. they will will not. they will do that. they do it with what we call the small footprint. we don't have to have enduring presence on the ground everywhere. we can do it by drone

strikes. occasional special operations forces a couple spice here and there. this is repeat of the strategy in the 1990s. the problem with the small footprint is, you don't have knowledge of what's going on on the ground. you're reliant on other people to give you that. targeting a drone or understanding which tribe is on your side you simply become dependent on others for manufacturing. and -- information. and the more dependent you become on others for information the more they manipulate and use their information to drive their agenda as opposed to yours. the forth problem is there is consistent effort on the part of the administration to simply demotion alize this by not naming the enemy anymore. if we don't name the enemy we're truly fighting nobody gets angry about it. but the problem about that you lose sense of moral purpose and strategic purpose when it is not clear who you're fighting anymore. what we argue for in our

strategy and i will just briefly put out, in terms of what we think are really the key things that are very, very important, the united states is going to have to be actively engaged in afghanistan, pakistan, india for some time to come. there will be no alternative to that. this administration can walk away, i'm telling you in two years we'll be right back there again. that is just the reality of the next decade. we spent a lot more focus in our strategy on two, i think, emergent problems which is state-sponsored terrorism particularly by iran and transnational criminal activities in mexico which are increasingly taking on characteristics of not only a terrorist organization but also a insurgency. this administration is simply refused to come up with a long-term, sustainable program for the detention of terrorists. that is a serious problem because, the detaining and investigating terrorists is probably the most valuable

source of operational intelligence. i talked to senior police officials in new york. they will tell you that 90% of the most valuable information they get is from interrogations. of that 90%, almost all of it comes from interrogation conducted overseas. we talk a lot in the strategy about capacity-building. obviously the united states can't and shouldn't, doesn't have to be everywhere in the world but we have an interest in working with friends and allies in building up their capacity. we do a very bad job of doing that the administration says we're doing this now and they can make an argument. but we're not doing in any way i call efficacious or efficient. we spend a lot of time in the report talking about cybersecurity and combating terrorism online. we spend a lot of time in the report naming enemy and response of talking about islamist ideology and how islamist ideology is different from religion of islam and combating islamist

ideology is vital and important as come patting terrorist operations themselves. we talk a lot in the report about the issue of domestic radicalization and extremism. the administration came out with a strategy not long ago about countering violent extremist. there is actually, there is actually some very valuable information in the document and there are some valuable tools but that document unfortunately is not a strategy. the administration hasn't revealed a plan how they're actually going to operationalize that. and use the federal government to give local communities the tools they need to combat terrorist activities and to maintain and construct healthy civil societieses in their own communities the final point we make in the strategy a robust strategy is completely affordable. i keep getting under the impression that this administration really believes we have to crank

back on war on terror because we simply can't afford it as a nation and i simply believe that is untrue. this nation can afford to defend itself. we have a lot of physical problems. defending ourself is not the root cause of any of them. we can't defend the country on the cheap. we talk about the importance of that. if either through the supercommittee or the sequestering that you went through cuts on the level that they're talking about, which would be in the national security community, well over a trillion dollars, you're not going to have the ability to project power that you're going to need. you will have a significant decline in intelligence capability. you're going to see cuts to programs in the homeland security and terrorism world that are really valuable and we're not going to be able to do the official, efficient capacity-building that we need to do. that, those cuts, are our biggest threat to our security today as any terrorist organization that we have in the world. so with that, we're be

pleased to take your questions, and your observation and comments. if you have a question if you would raise your hand. we have a question over here. wait until you get to the microphone so folks listening on the radio or tv can hear your question. if you state your name and affiliation, that would be very helpful. sir, over to you. >> thank you. very interesting conversation. my name is adam nixon. i'm with middle east broadcasting tv. i want to talk specifically about the massive terrorist attack. all of us will remember back to 2002, 03, 04, a lot of the conversation was about anthrax, sarin gas, louis nukes, dirty bombs and we've seen that conversation wane somewhat. we've probably gotten better about dealing with these things. we think of it as less of a threat today. how is that conversation affected by the arab spring? first of all we talk about the arab spring we think it

is repudiation of islamist ideology. the arab spring happened on a different track than islamism, right? yesterday we saw a story, i think "the washington post" where they said nuclear material in libya may be unsecure, right? so where are we today regarding all of that stuff? where are we today regarding the massive terrorist attack? >> that's a great question. and, i wanted to jump up when dave and jess were talking do the thing like in the finance thing they're trying to sell you stocks, you go past performance is no guaranty of future --, all of this stuff is no guaranty what terrorists will do in the future. terrorists have infin anyone -- infinite number of opportunities to them. if you look back at the japanese cult they were innovators of all innovators. if they didn't have some of the world's most stupid scientists they would have killed a lot of people. they had all the smartest people in the world. they weren't smart in research and development.

here's what we know and see. if you look from the chatter perspective there is still plenty of aspirational talk about massive terrorist attacks and killing very large numbers of people. so that is certainly still out there. but it does remain aspirational. there has been i actually think good work on the high end of focusing, on things like the proliferation security initiative, to focusing on really weapons of mass destruction. that is money largely well-spent. i mean, i hate the discussion well, nuclear terrorism. they go that a low probability but high consequence event. well, that's stupid talk. how, to have, if you're going to issue a probability you have to have a data set. dave is the expert on this. you have a data set of zero. how are you issuing a probabilities? you can't. you can not issue statistical probabilities on things like bio weapons attacks or nuclear attacks. they are one-off events that

will happen or won't happen. those are warm, comforting words to some people. that is low probability, they go, oh, gees. that is meaningless swerm. they were "black swan"s and they will happen when they happen like 6.0 earthquake, it is perfectly predictable. it is word while worrying about weapons of mass destruction but what we are seeing in the data is what people still are have interest in getting those materials. the trend is what i call weapons of mass disruption, right? which is, in stringing together a bunch of activities to create a larger scale effect out of scale with what you're actually doing. i think mumbai was a good precursor of that. small guys spread around town, killing few people, magnifying their activity through chaos and disruption and everything else.

armed attacks are kind of on their way back. and multiple bombings are another good example. where you have a bomb and then, people respond to the bomb and then there's another bomb, right? so it doesn't take a genius to say, let's do a couple of those and let's do some armed attacks. so i think, if i was going to, pick the terrorist trend of the future, i would say you want to look at people stringing together a bunch of things that you don't need sophisticated technology or very scarce materials to do, but, can have a consequence out of scope with what they're doing. maybe stringing, adding a cyber attack to a physical attack like we saw for example, the russians did in the georgian war. if there is a wave of the future i think that's the things, sow chaos through stringing couple things together. the flipside to that when you do that, the more sophisticated your plot

becomes the more signals you're setting off you're doing something, if you've got good counterterrorism in place, that should be more easily to be countered. so that is kind of the state of the art where we are today. sir? >> stuart -- private citizen. since somebody in this country by whatever means would tend to lay low and not be a small criminal, while waiting to carry out his plot, has anybody made a correlation between this latest, we won't deport the illegal aliens that we round up for some reason or other, versus the potential for terrorism then for being helped? >> so i think what the data shows is, particularly when you look at the united states is, terrorists tend to be a small data set of any data set other than other terrorists. so there is almost, i mean there is almost no community you can in a sense say, that is where you will find the

terrorists. in fact where we've kind of see that happen, law enforcement has been able to zero in, semieffectively and address it. so for example, we saw a lot of activity, we do, actually, somali community, recruiting people and sending them overseas. the somali communities are red flagged. if you run around in the somali community try to recruit somebody you are likely to recruit fbi agent as you are a potential terrorist. so the, but, you raise a really good point though which i think is worth discussing because the secretary came out about this and where she said the problem now is lone wolf. everybody throws out the lone wolf as if that is something that we should all be scared about right? well the reality is, few lone wolfs are truly lone and hidden and give off no signal. for example we went back and looked at norway guy who killed inordinant number of people that was a good example after weapon of mass

destruction attack, when they started to unpack what did they discover? they discovered there were lot of signals which this guy had done which should have drawn the attention of legitimate law enforcement. i'm not talking about violating somebody's civil leb berths or freedom of speech or whatever. that guy did enough things at least in the united states that would have been indicators would have at least triggered, if not an investigation, at least a law enforcement assessment. so few lone wolfs are truly lone in the sense if you have good ct programs out there, that there aren't some signals you could pull off. again you're going to find some of these people are totally low and obscure and everything else but the good news, if they're good news there is, if they killed a lot of people it is because they're lucky, not necessarily because they're good. and the other thing is, they're probably only going to do it once, right? there is no network or anything to support that. that is what you really worry about. what you really worry about

if somebody has a network that can do bad things that is threat to your society, not just a threat to a couple of people. one of the things we did in the report is we talk a lot about transnational criminal activity and why that is such a great concern. that is an organized network with a lot of money with very, you know, like $40 billion a year for, you know, people, drugs, money and guns. i mean, they were the only people that didn't ask for any stimulus money. [laughter] they have a vested interest. they have an organization and they're increasingly have characteristics that looked like both insurgent and terrorist groups. so those are people we really, really need to worry about. what i want jessica to briefly, the loin wolf provision is actually one of the provision. talk about fisa and patriot act and why they were so significant in terms of plots we thwarted. >> if you look at those 40 plots that were thwarted, even specifically if you

look at three plots were foiled by luck even though it has red flagses like jim is saying, look at the christmas bomber, for instance his father went to the state department gave warnings. there were failure to connect the dots. that points the need for early intelligence. there is within that, is the patriot act. jim was saying there is surveillance, the lone wolf provisions things like that. three key provisions are expiring and they have been up for renewal every year but yet to have permanent authorization. they have been key in thwarting several of these attacks. zazi the surveillance provision was used in thwarting zazi the guy in colorado. we've seen many other instances that point to the fact that this is an important provision for intelligence that should get permanent authorization. >> yeah. i think one. things that people don't realize very few criminal

investigations don't normally work on a calendar. we start them on january 1 and we conclude them by december 31. so many of them can go on for months and years. if you think from the investigator's perspective. if you are using investigative authorities to actually go after a systemic conspiracy and you don't know if those authorities are going to be around six months from now, right? so you're playing an investigation not knowing what tools will be available to you later on in the year. that makes no sense. so this annual renewal of these authorities, that is the worst of all possible -- well not having them is the worst of all possible worlds. the notion we renewed it, therefore we're good patriots i don't think that cuts it anymore. we're not giving our investigators a predictable environment so they need they know what tools will be lasting not six months, nine months, but a year or two years or three years or four years. some of these material support cases it takes a long time to build a case you need to build.

>> we're not giving them several tools already present in criminal investigations. >> we had a question in the back. >> get a microphone back there. >> ronald while white i'm congressional staffer. looking at things going on with the budget terri environment and political environment do you perceive in the future depending how things go there could be a blood in the water effect, that the terrorists may detect if we contract when it comes to global reach? if we contract with our involvement in the rest of the world? some of your philosophical thoughts on some of that. is that a major threat here. >> i want to bring dave here. dave has got a great, i think an enormously powerful and telling chart in his report where, you know, as the, there's kind of two hills in the terrorist trends, right? one goss up in the late '80ses and then it plummets like a rock. that is very clear. what that was the result was

the rise was the soviet aggression post u.s. failure in vietnam. where the soviets really believed that america was on the ropes. that we were on the decline and that all we needed was a little, handle to get us to push over the edge. you saw insurgencies and terrorism being sponsored literally worldwide. and so the numbers, through the 80s this go up and up and up. and then the cold war ends and the numbers fall off the chart. so, there's a case where we went to sleep in the '70s and things got worse. the cold war ends and you know, we live in this land of milk and honey. and we are literally using for terrorism the law enforcement paradigm, which is, find one you arrest them. we're done here, right? what you don't see in that trend is, as the numbers are going down, and as america's interest in combating terrorism is increasingly

waning, despite the fact number of hearings in the congress goes through the roof and, al qaeda is laying plots for a global insurgency. and so, while the decline looks good, what is missing is underneath the planning and setup for the, for the 9/11 era. and so then you see that being operationalized on 9/11 and the terrorist attacks peak up. then is it 2005? >> yes. >> in 2005, what happens? well, by 2005, all our ct programs are in place or being put in place and magicly the numbers start to go down again. so in my mind, what, the administration is doing is repeating the mistakes of the end of the cold war. they want to kind of turn their back on the problem again because it's, literally is going away. the number of attacks has declined. you want to talk anymore about the trend numbers? >> well, if you go through the report and it is on page 5, our chart 4, and it is

right here. as jim said, you can see that during the 1980s, terrorism is really taking off against the united states. and then right after the cold war ends, we have a significant drop. we go into this lull period. and then you can see while we're in the lull period, we have al qaeda and other organizations are plotting their activities. we have a spike-up, representing the 2001 and after area. we are building our resources during this time period. hopeful think resources resulted in decline. we have this huge wave. it decreases. we have another wave and it decreases. right now the question for policy is, are we going into a lull and sort of be complacent and think we've sort of beat the problem? we contract and not be proactive. or are we going to realize, wow, we're retracting not being proactive, terrorists and organizations against our country are plotting the new wave, new ideas, new

innovations to carry out attacks against us. we don't want to get lulled into a place of complacency. we want to make sure that even, though, terrorist acts against the united states have gone down sharply in the last few years we need to make sure we're still diligent. >> jim, you want to talk about anything since 2009, what has happened to the numbers domestically? >> we've sign the number of attacks go down we've seen number of plots, that same period, that same breaking point, they have gone up. >> but, yeah. >> question here in the back. >> yep. >> [inaudible]. joint ied organization. got a question for mike and jessica. when you were looking at outcomes, when you were doing your at that tis i cans -- statistics did you look at economic impact for a factor? then for james, in the strategy you talk about, you really talk about leading with south asia and pakistan and given that 80% of ieds

are killing our troops over there based out of precursors coming from fertilizer-based coming from pakistan. you mentioned dubai bombings and oslo and fertilizer-based bombing cases what about the at administrations efforts to rein in the home based fertilizer based explosions. >> is it economic based or -- >> doesn't look at out comes such as economic or social factors. just the occurrence of terrorism, think of, basically a descriptive analysis. tell you these are the acts. these are what methods. what tactics were used. where the events occurred. this report doesn't take another step to draw inferential conclusions for things such as the economic impact. >> so in terms of restrictions on materials,

you know, when you look at homeland security side, it really is kind of a cold calculus of cost and benefits, right? so, the question is, where is the break point between doing something, to take a bad thing off the table, and the, costs to you in terms of loss in economic productivity. loss of individual freedoms and everything else. and, the, you know the constitution is a good guide because it creates a very clear lines in terms of what government can and can not do. that's wonderful. but then we get into areas of, really about choice, right? there is a large gray area between what you definitely shouldn't do, like, you know, arbitrarily take away somebody's right to first amendment and gray areas about things that government can do. but the question is, should they do them or not? so what you're really talking about is what people in the trade call dual-use. which is something that you can use for something good

and something you can use for something bad. i guess everything is technically dual-use. a baseball ba bat good thing in hands in the yankees and bad thing if it is in the hands of red sox. you can perpetrate evil with a baseball bat, right? so you want to keep, the what do you do about the things dual-use in the world where they have good applications and bad applications? this is i think a really a question of strategy. i say on the high end where you have dual-use technologies which clearly lead us into the weapons of mass destruction realm, right? nuclear, certain bio things, certain chemical things, clearly there you want to pay attention. and again on high-end, for example, chemical is good example. there's a enormous effort to regulate a lot of things on chemical which don't really rise to the level of concerns of weapons of mass destruction. but when you get to the wend where it is really a wmd thing, i think it is legitimate for government to

have, pay a lot of attention and concern. when you get to the lower end of things in terms of the consequence, and also in terms of their positive values, things like fertilizer, you know, i think then the balance, you know, shifts somewhat, right? and there i think, is, that's not saying, you know, you do nothing. right? so i mean, it is like a gun in the home, right? well you could have a law banning guns in the home, problem solved, right? i wouldn't do that because it is a violation of the constitution but i might tell a parent to, you know, have a lock, on the trick are lock and keep it in the closest out of the reach of children. that is something very modest and reasonable, right? so, on the low end of things i would put much more of my investment in the investigatory tools to detect people abusing, likely to do that, rather than in things like running around banning use of fertilizer. i give you a good example of a wasteful activity we did. almost every truck driver in

the universe has to have a hazmat license, right? background investigation, eggs else? hazmat is enormously broad and general term covers everything from fingernail polish, right. we fear some potential terrorist might want to get ahold of fingernail poll sir, the driver of that hazmat truck has to have a special license and background investigation. that is kind of nuts. all hazardous early material are not the same and having blanket requirement for everybody driving hazardous material that is drag on the economy and society and that is not really necessary. i'm not horribly sympathetic with the notion let's restrict more things out of people's hand. i would much rather see that dollar go into investigatory and sharing tools to identify what bad people are going to do with things. we have, let's go over here, sir and we'll go over there. over there. >> from the australian policy institute. >> you came a long way just

for this. >> i have, it is a long flight. look, i just wanted to come back to the question about the budget and fiscal environment here and the sort of strategy that you've outlined here, james, because it seems, you sort of advocating a very expansionary activist international strategy. i just wonder whether or not there were things in the current u.s. counterterrorism strategy that you could identify that you would cut. >> right. >> that would be able to afford, you know the kind of activist strategy you advocate? >> thanks for that question. there is a whole swath of things. there are actually more on the homeland security anti-terrorism side. where there are things that, and this is really where i do find that there is simply inexcusable. we couldn't be in a debt crisis but as good conservative i would still be ranting about this because why are you spending money on things that aren't delivering goods or services? homeland security side there is good deal of that. homeland security grants or other programs costing us

money which we get no value for or putting restrictions on our economic productivity and the movement of people, goods, services ideas which are unhelp phil. which do have a list of those. and they are in our homeland security 4.0 report. but the basic areas are homeland security grants. as a matter of fact i will have dave talk because dave's also done a lot of really groundbreaking research on evaluating the efficacy of grants and one in particular which is the grants that we give to small fire departments. i think that is actually a very, very good example of kind of things we shouldn't be doing. you want to talk about the program research? >> sure. we looked at 10,000 fire departments over a several year period. about half received federal funding it purchase equipment, in addition to paying for the salaries of firefighters. we compared them to the other half, control them for various socioeconomic factors.

we found that fire departments that received funding from the federal government actually did no better than fire departments that re sieved no funding in materials of saving lives, due to fires and injuries to civilians and firemen. the federal government right now is putting a lot of resources into paying fire departments, local fire departments to be local fire departments. there is no real value added role applied here. it is just saying we're going to assume that the federal government, we're going to assume part of your local budget now. there is a move towards, supplanting or subsidizing the routine operations of local fire departments away from trying to help regions, cities and towns, build a capacity to respond to events. that is much more value-added role than just paying fire departments to be fire departments. that is what the federal government's into right now

which seems, really not a value added role for helping protect the homeland from terrorist events or natural disasters. >> this is something we've seen in homeland security grants in general. the notion behind homeland security grants is a post-9/11 initiative we have to increase the capacity of state and local governments to deal with these things. they went on the grant vehicle because quite honestly that was the most readily obvious vehicle we had and we had done in the past. it was the weapon of choice because it was the weapon at hand. so what we have seen after 10 years of doing this thing is exactly what dave said. it is by and large what we've seen somebody who is spending a dollar on something and federal government gave them 50 cents, they said thank you very much then proceeded to spend 50 cents. so we didn't actually do any capacity-building. now that's a double problem. one is we're not actually doing any capacity-building but the other problem is, what we are doinging we're diverting resources from the federal enterprise into the

state enterprise, right? so if you're saying what's the problem. i'm paying taxes in maryland. i'm paying taxes to the federal government. i'm going to pay for it one way or another? the difference is one you're not building any capacity and the second problem is, you're actually making the federal government less responsive in the things that are responsibility for the federal government. this is the most clearly reflected, if you look at the shipbuilding in the coast guard for example, which we are chronically underfunding shipbuilding in the coast guard. so we're not putting ships at sea that we need. so if you take, took that same amount of money from the grant program and put it against the shipbuilding program here's what would happen. we would get ships we need. and state and local governments because these are public safety requirements in the end, they would pay for things they need because they're public safety requirements. and come back over here. let's go over here first. >> thank you. my name is john from the

osgood center for international studies. james, this question is for you. you mentioned that obama's is choosing not to call the enemy by its name. he is trying to deemotionalize the threat that the country faces. my question is, do you feel that is a fair critique in light of 2001, following 9/11, the threat, the enemy was identified as bin laden. quickly afterwards, it was saddam. then in 2006 it was iran? i to remember in 2008 he identified al qaeda and bin laden. he made that a campaign theme. do you feel that is fair critique? >> i do. and i suppose it would have been fair to extend that back to the bush administration as well, which i don't think had a great answer for this either but, and, i think this is one of the key findings in the report or one of the key assessments in the report which is, in addition to the great work that jess and dave have done, and the a

lot of the work we've done in heritage, is based on some pretty extensive, open source intelligence research. the, there's a difference between an insurgency and a terrorist campaign. even if, even terrorists that have an ideology right, the bider gang, they had an ideology but strictly speaking terrorists. in the sense a terrorist who uses slaughter of innocents to further a political agenda, right? and even though they had an ideology, the expression of that ideology was primarily exercised through the act of terrorism. and insurgency, is, has the same, can have the same goal which is radical political change. an insurgency can use

terrorism or other acts of violence as a component of that goal but the differences in an insurgency also uses other tools to a great extent including propaganda, political advocacy, psychological war fair -- warfare. insurgency is a broader attack on society than just slaughtering people in the street and you have to have a different tactic for dealing with an insurgency than you do with a terrorist campaign. let's be honest at end of the day if you have a whacky ideology and you're terrorist and we kill you, we're donner who. look at the turn of the century movement in the 19th century, 20th century of, you know, the anarchists right? probably being an anarchist is philosophy there should be no organization, right? hard to get organized if you're an anarchist. there weren't really all that many anarchists in the world.

they weren't terribly well-organized because they're anarchists for sakes. they were over even though they had an ideology it was irrelevant because we got rid of them all, right? an insurgency is more insidious than that, right? in an insurgency you do have to battle the ideology. when you're fighting a terrorist campaign you are you have a choice about whether you're fighting -- same with criminals, right. look at mafia, right? there's an ideology there. we've all seen the godfather. if you haven't you should watch it every day because it really prepares you well to work in washington. [laughter] the point is, there's an, i mean, or the sopranos. i think in many ways though all fictionalized it captures, there is an ideology to these criminal organizations. it is true. the point is the primary expression of that ideology is through their criminal ac